ESWC2016 workshopMay 29th, 2016

Services and Applications over Linked APIs and Data

Services and Applications over Linked APIs and Data

The challenge

The World Wide Web has significantly evolved during the past 25
years, developing from a collection of a few interlinked static pages
to a global ubiquitous platform for sharing, searching, and browsing
dynamic and customisable content, in a variety of different media
formats. Future developments bring the promise of a higher level of
automation, distributed search and the use of intelligent personal
agents1, which autonomously perform tasks on behalf of the user. The
foundation for these trends is laid by the ever growing number of
users and web sites, the increasing data volumes, but also by the use
and popularity of Linked Data and Web APIs. Unfortunately, despite
some initial efforts2,3 and progress towards integrated use, these
two technologies remain mostly disjunct in terms of developing
solutions and applications. To this purpose, SALAD aims to explore
the possibilities of facilitating a better fusion of Web APIs and
Linked Data, thus enabling the harvesting and provisioning of data
through applications and services on the Web. In particular, we focus
on investigating how both static and dynamic resources (for example,
sensor data or streams), exposed via interfaces on the Web, can be
used together with semantic data, as means for enabling a shared use
and providing a basis for developing rich applications.

The workshop

With this workshop, we aim to discover new ways to embrace the
opportunities that Web APIs offer in terms of data consumption,
processing, and provisioning but also to investigate the
possibilities of integrating them more closely with Linked Data. We
want to challenge researchers towards developing integrated
description and implementation approaches through both paper
submissions and interactive on-site discussion and dialog. In
particular we are looking for description approaches, formal models,
implementation solutions, use cases, and applications that support a
more automated and unified Web API and Linked Data use.

The goals

The main goal of this workshop is to explore the possibilities
of enabling a more integrated and automated use of Web APIs, given
the context of the growing importance of Linked Data and
applications, benefiting from the available resources. Relevant
topics include:

frameworks, methods, models, and formats for describing Web
APIs

design of distributed systems based on semantic API
technology

overcoming performance issues in the interaction with APIs

development of intelligent and generic Web API clients

supporting WoT development with Web APIs and Linked Data

designing applications by connecting Web APIs and Linked
Data for reading and writing

address scalability issues while dealing with large data
volumes

business models for Linked Data and Web API

The above list is not exhaustive and we, therefore, actively
encourage participants to be creative. A final goal is to provide
future initiatives with the devised ideas and visions to stimulate
innovation in this research area.